Ammendorf during the war was the leading centre for the production of what was given the camouflage name Orgacid which is a fatal chemical substance which produces bubbles on the limbs and internal organs. The costs were initially estimated at 36 million Reichsmarks. In 2001, the contaminated bunker temporarily sheltered after the collapse of the DDR in 1989, in which lost supplies were once stored, was still being monitored - albeit now only routinely. The soil surrounding it still contains evil-smelling remnants of warfare, mainly from decomposed products which today are officially (and conveniently) regarded harmless. The re-sealed, internally tiled, double-walled concrete bunkers remain, not least for an indefinite time, as a continuing memory of the poisonous legacy of the Nazis because blasting and disposal is not only too expensive, but also risky. Even the Russians had failed to remove the entire poison gas complex. Even during the Nazi era there had been problems with the production of orgacid gases, so that an expert's report was produced in 1940 repeated in 1991 with repeated warnings after extensive soil analyses.

The fire station and war memorial in 1940 and now.

The Friedensschule in the 1930s and Grundschule Radewell in 1942 and today

The corner of Hauptstrasse and Merseburger Strasse

Looking towards Merseburger Strasse

Horst-Heilmann-Strasse

The corner of Hohe Strasse and Regensburger Strasse

Fritz-Kießling-Strasse

Views of Gärtnerstrasse a century apart

Magdeburg

The town hall bedecked with swastikas and today

The Dom with the memorial to the SA in front during the NSDAP era, now gone.

The
memorial replaced one removed by the Nazis (today inside the
cathedral)- Barlach's Magdeburger Ehrenmal, ordered by the city to be a
memorial of World War I, and expected to show heroic German soldiers
fighting for their glorious country. Barlach, however, created a
sculpture with three German soldiers, a fresh recruit, a young officer
and an old reservist, standing in a cemetery, all bearing marks of the
horror, pain and desperation of the war, flanked by a mourning war widow
covering her face in despair, a skeleton wearing a German army helmet,
and a civilian (the face is that of Barlach himself) with his eyes
closed and blocking his ears in terror. This naturally created a
controversy with the pro-war population (several nationalists and Nazis
claimed that the soldiers must be foreign since true Germans would be
more heroic), and the sculpture was removed. Friends of Barlach were
able to hide the sculpture until after the war, when it was returned to
the Magdeburg Cathedral.

Alfred Rosenberg, in Blut und Ehre. Ein Kampf für deutsche Wiedergeburt. Reden und Aufsätze von 1919-1933
(Munich, 1934), described Barlach’s Magdeburg War Memorial thus: ‘A
mixed variety of short, undefinable sorts of people wearing semi-idiotic
expressions and Soviet helmets are supposed to symbolise German home
guards! I believe that every healthy SA man will pass the same judgement
here as any conscious artist.’

Hitler spoke here at the Stadthalle on October 22, 1932

Hasselbachplatz then and now

After the war. Magdeburg was where the Soviets took Hitler's remains (and those of Eva Braun and Goebels and his family) from the Reich Chancellery by the Soviets in May 1945 and in June 1945 were buried in a forest near Rathenau, Germany and then later in the year, disinterred and reburied in Madgeburg at the site of a Soviet Red Army garrison. They remained there until early 1970 when the garrison was turned over to the East Germans. In order to prevent the burial site from being discovered and turned into a fascist shrine, the bodies were disinterred, burned, and the ashes crushed/ground up, and dumped in the Biederitz River.The Russians claim that a fragment of Hitler's skull and his jawbone are in the FSB (former KGB) archives although DNA analysis has shown that the remains are from those of a woman aged 20-40 years of age.

When
the Soviets’ Operation Myth was launched in 1946 to establish the real
sequence of events leading to Hitler’s death, some of Hitler’s personal
staff were brought back to Berlin and the bunker, in order to point out
the precise details of the suicide and subsequent burning in the garden.
The bones, for the time being, were stored in Magdeburg. Of particular
importance were the objects in Hitler’s personal collection. For them an
aircraft was laid on as Stalin wanted his bones examined by his
foremost experts. The Führer’s skull was eventually put into a paper bag
and deposited in the State Archives.

Dessau
has changed considerably since it was under the hakenkreuz, as the surroundings around the statue of Leopold I. von Anhalt-Dessau ("Der
alte Dessauer") in front of the Marienkirche shows. Dessau is famous for
its college of architecture Bauhaus. It moved here in 1925 after it had
been forced to close in Weimar. Many famous artists were lecturers in
Dessau in the following years, among them Walter Gropius, Paul Klee and
Wassily Kandinsky. The Nazis forced the closure of the Bauhaus in 1931,
and it was not reopened until 1986. As in many other German cities, the Old Synagogue was burnt down in 1938, and the remaining Jews were deported.The city was almost completely destroyed by Allied air raids on March 7, 1945, six weeks before American troops occupied the town. The Junkers aircraft and engine plants located on the outskirts of Dessau were the target of a total of 20 allied air raids from 1940 onwards. Part of residential development on the south-western outskirts of the city as well as railways were damaged. On 7 March 1945, the densely populated city centre of Dessau became the core target area of ​​a nightly British bomb attack within the scope of the Area Bombing Directive, with 520 heavy Lancaster bombers and 1,700 tonnes of explosive and fire bombs. The air raids killed 700 people and destroyed 80% of the built-up urban area. In the Old Town, nearly 97 percent of all buildings were completely destroyed or irreversibly damaged. The historical cityscape, with its churches, castle grounds, many public buildings, aristocratic and citizen buildings, was almost completely lost. The very high degree of destruction is due in particular to the combination use of fire and explosive bombs, including many air mines.

The Johanniskirche used to be situated on Horst-Wessel-Platz as seen in this 1942-franked postcard

Hitler spoke here at the Kristallpalast in 1931

The rathaus in 1938, after the war (having been bombed March 4, 1945), and today

On
October 23, Hitler dispatched a telegram expressing his condolences to
the widow of Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter Loeper in Dessau who had
died following a prolonged illness. Three days later Hitler attended
Loeper’s funeral in Dessau where his body was interred at the
Napoleonsturm, calling him an “apostle of the Movement.” From Hitler's eulogy delivered at the Friedrich Theatre:

When
Fate is especially fond of a man and wishes to bestow upon him the best
thing in the world, it will give him loyal friends, men who are
resolved to share with him equally both joy and sorrow, men whom nothing
can lead astray, men who, particularly in days of need, stand by him
firm and resolute. I have been given a most generous share of this
happiness and good fortune such as perhaps only few people in this world
have.Yet this happiness of so many years turns to pain when I
now see how this and that member of the community of fighters is called
to his Maker. When I speak here today, I am speaking as the happy—yet
now so unhappy—Führer who must now accompany a member of his old guard
to the grave, a man the likes of whom are rare even in our Movement.Once
he came to me when one could expect nothing more from this Movement
than sacrifices and troubles, persecution and abuse. And truly it was
only love of Germany which led him to that host of inseparable men who
were determined to take up and pursue the battle for a new Germany
against all odds. This man, with his boundless love of Germany, also had
an unshakeable faith [in Adolf Hitler]. This faith was combined, in his
case, with a unique loyalty [to Adolf Hitler]. He was one of the most
loyal members of the old guard. During the time of struggle, we never
spoke about it; no one would have understood it anyway. But today, at
the bier of my dead comrade in arms, I must express it in words for
German youth, that they may aspire to the same.The new Reich was not
given to us; it had to be hard won in battle, and in this fight only an
over-abundance of love for Germany, of faith, of willingness to
sacrifice, and of loyalty allowed [us] to triumph. That is something the
German Volk must know. For it is my wish that the names of these first
apostles of our Movement go down in German history for all eternity.
Party comrade Loeper was a zealot, but he was more than that: a strong,
self-sufficient man as hard as granite. He was persistent as only few
are, untiring in his work and never swaying from the conviction: in the
end we must succeed!Hence for many of us this Party comrade was a
model, in his unselfish modesty too, in his personal simplicity and in
his lack of emotionalism: he was strictly a helper devoted to our great
mutual cause.Formerly the captain of the pioneers of the World War,
he became a captain and pioneer of the National Socialist
Weltanschauung, of our Revolution, and thus of our new German Reich. By
having waged this battle in his lifetime, he lives on for us in death.
He is a man for the German future. He deserves to be distinguished from
the masses of hundreds of thousands and millions and be held up before
the nation for all time! And this applies particularly to German youth.
They shall hear this, and they shall learn from it. They shall once
again realize that the old fealty was not only a virtue of the Teutons.
The new Reich was built up with this virtue as its basis. This Reich
would not be standing today were it not founded upon this fidelity [to
Adolf Hitler].A wonderful life has thus come to a close. Yet today
we are all overcome by deep sorrow that our Party comrade, our Gauleiter
and our Reichsstatthalter has been forced to leave us so soon, one of
the old guard. Our hearts bleed when we see how our ranks slowly begin
to thin out.But as the old passes, so the young grows to take its
place. For this old guard did not live in vain, did not struggle and
fight in vain. From their work and their influence has sprung forth the
richest of blessings—and Party comrade Captain Loeper was one of the
most blessed of men.

On
May 29, 1938 Hitler attended the opening of the new theatre in Dessau,
the first building of its kind to have been completed during the rule of
the National Socialist regime.

The town football club giving the Hitler salute and today. SV Dessau 05 was
founded in July 1905 as FC Adler. Thirty years later in 1935, after the
re-organisation of German football under the Third Reich, Dessau played
in the Gauliga Mitte, one of sixteen new upper class divisions. The
club quickly emerged as a strong side, capturing three division titles
from 1937–39, finishing second the next two seasons, and then winning
another three consecutive titles from 1942–44. However, Dessau was never
able to achieve any kind of success in the subsequent playoff rounds of
the national championships, making it past the preliminary rounds only
once in six attempts. In 1942, the team advanced as far as the
quarterfinals of the Tschammerpokal, predecessor of today's German Cup.
After World War II most organisations in Germany, including sports
associations and football clubs, were dissolved by the occupying Allied
authorities. The club was re-formed in late 1945 as Blau-Weiss Dessau.

Tangermünde

Neustädter Tor in 1935 and today. Shortly after the beginning of the Nazi era in August 1933 about 100 members of workers' organisations were assembled and mistreated in the town hall by SA men. A communist citizen succumbed to the abuse. The Second World War left relatively few traces in the city centre; American artillery destroyed valuable half-timbered houses whilst in the north of the city the Elbe bridge, completed in 1933, was destroyed in April 1945. The Elbe could, therefore, be crossed by the units of the 12th Army (Wenck's Army), with remnants of the 9th Army on its retreat to the west, over a narrow wooden bridge erected on the ruins of the bridge.

Torgau

The
Alltagskirche Torgau. Outside Germany, the town is best known as the
place where, during the Second World War, United States Army forces
coming from the west met forces of the Soviet Union coming from the east
during the invasion of Germany on April 25, 1945, which is now
remembered as "Elbe Day". Units of the American First Army and the
Soviet First Ukrainian Front met on the bridge at Torgau, and at
Lorenzkirch (near Strehla), 20 miles to the south. The unit commanders
met the following day at Torgau for an official handshake. This marked
the beginning of the line of contact between Soviet and American forces,
but not the finalized occupation zones. In fact the area surrounding
Torgau initially occupied by U.S. forces was later, in July 1945, given
over to Soviet forces in compliance with the Yalta agreement. After the
war, in 1949, a film called Encounter at the Elbe was released
from Mosfilm about this meeting of the two armies. According to
journalist Andy Rooney, who was a correspondent in Europe at the time,
the Red Army raided the Hohner accordion and harmonica factory at Torgau
at the time. There was nothing surprising about that, Rooney said;
armies have been plundering civilian property for ages. What was
surprising was that half of the soldiers in the Red Army seemed to know
how to play a musical instrument. There was a woman, a singer, who had
been held prisoner at Torgau during the war, Rooney said, and the
Russians freed her. She gave an impromptu concert in the town square,
and the sound of her voice rising above the combined accordions and
harmonicas playing in unison was something one would never
forget.[citation needed] Torgau was one of the prisons where Reinhold
Eggers spent his post war imprisonment after being sentenced by the
Soviets. Eggers had been the Security Officer at Oflag IV-C during the
war, Colditz Castle.

Staßfurt

Steinstraße in 1940 and today. Staßfurt had been the home of Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, who had served as Minister of Finance of Germany from 1932 to 1945 and as Leading Minister of the German Reich (Chancellor) in May 1945. He had been appointed to the post by Franz von Papen in 1932. At the request of President Paul von Hindenburg, he continued in that office under Kurt von Schleicher and Adolf Hitler. During May 1945, after the suicides of Hitler and his designated successor Josef Goebbels, he also served in the historically unique position of Leading Minister of the German Reich, the equivalent of a Chancellorship, in the short-lived Flensburg government of President Karl Dönitz. Schwerin von Krosigk also held the essentially nominal offices of Foreign Minister and Finance Minister in the provisional government that controlled only a small, progressively shrinking portion of Germany, due to the rapid advance of the Allied forces who finally dissolved it and arrested its members. Besides Adolf Hitler himself, Schwerin von Krosigk and Wilhelm Frick were the only members of the Third Reich's cabinet to serve continuously from Hitler's appointment as Chancellor until his death.

In the early weeks, Finance Minister Schwerin von Krosigk, who had met Hitler for the first time when the cabinet was sworn in on 30 January, was not alone in finding him ‘polite and calm’ in the conduct of government business, well-briefed, backed by a good memory, and able to ‘grasp the essentials of a problem’, concisely sum up lengthy deliberations, and put a new construction on an issue.

Kershaw

By receiving the golden NSDAP Party Badge from Adolf Hitler given for honour on January 30, 1937 he became a member of the NSDAP (membership number: 3.805.231). He also joined the academy of German Law in 1937. At the 1949 Ministries Trial, he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to 10 years in gaol, but was granted amnesty in 1951. He later worked as an author and publicist.

Alsleben an der Saale

What had been the NSV ((National Socialist People's Welfare) Erholungsheim, now the town's school

The hometown of
one of Germany's greatest war heroes, the U-boat ace Gunther Prien,
these two photographs show clearly the radical changes since the war. Wittenberg

Schloßstraße
with the Schloßkirche on the left and the Stadtkirche from the market
square July 29, 1941 and now, from where Luther preached his famous invocavit sermons and which, in 1547 during the Schmalkaldic War, the towers' stone pyramids were removed to make platforms for cannon. Numerous air raids during the war led to the fact that the workers in the armaments factories could scarcely rest and yet still the machines running on high transects continued.
Although the bomber units mainly flew to Berlin, 1944 Anglo-American
bombshells in the eastern part of the city damaged several houses,
destroyed the railway station and Filmburg cinema in the Mittelstraße.
In the summer of 1944, an outer camp of Sachsenhausen concentration camp
in Wittenberg was built to maintain the armaments industry. Before the
invasion of the Red Army on 26 April 1945, the Elbbrücke and the
Flutbrücke in the present district of Pratau were demolished. After the
arrival of the Soviet soldiers, Wittenberg, as in other German cities,
was attacked by the civilian population. It was only gradually that the
command of the Soviet troops could end the chaotic conditions.
Gradually, life in the city became normal after the most severe war
damage had been removed. Until 1991, the Soviet Army occupied several
city districts (including the area around today's New Town Hall, the
Arsenal Square, or the residential area around the eastern
Thomas-Müntzer-Straße).

In
1988, the Sculptor Wieland Schmiedel was commissioned to produce a
commemorative plaque paying homage to the victims of the Holocaust. It's
currently in the consistory of the church, whilst the judensau showing
Jews sucking the tits and anus of a pig is allowed to be exhibited
outside on the façade. Inscribed over the obscene scene are the words Schem Ha Mphoras, claimed to posses a power Jews have which they keep protected from gentiles.This phrase is actually repeated in the commemorative plaque which reads

("God's original name, the maligned Shem Ha Mphoras, which the Jews held holy before the Christians, died in the six million Jews under the sign of the cross.") That the cross was the twisted cross of the Nazis as opposed to the Christian one, and that the phrase did not simply "die" shows how insincere and forced German attempts to say something about their collective guilt are.

The Thesentor on which Luther nailed his 95 theses during the Nazi era and today. A former student's History Extended Essay on Luther's Use of Language in Allowing the Protestant Reformation to Succeed received an A from the IBO. During the Nazi era, on 13 June 1935, the most serious explosion occurred since the existence of WASAG's Reinsdorfer explosives plant in which 82 people were killed and large parts of the plant were destroyed. In the same year a branch of Arado Flugzeugwerke was set up in Wittenberg, where women from the Ravensbrück concentration camp were forced to work under conditions that were unsafe to thesay the least. In 1936, Wittenberg became a garrison town of the Wehrmacht. In the Pogromnacht in 1938 there were riots in front of Jewish shops and apartments with Jewish citizenssubsequently arrested and deported. Merseburg

Postcard
showing the town flanked by Hitler and Hindenburg on the 1000th
anniversary of the 933 Battle of Riade, where King Henry the Fowler
gained his great victory over the Hungarians in the vicinity. In 1935 a military airfield was put into operation west of the city, where an aviation garrison was stationed. During the Second World War Merseburg experienced 19 air raids in 1944 and 1945, of which three were classified as very heavy and several as medium. Often, the city was affected by attacks on the neighbouring Leuna works, but several times was the recipient of the main bombing. In
doing so, the east wing of the castle as well as large parts of the
inner city were almost completely destroyed and the towing sluice was
damaged. Most of the attacks were courtesy of the US Air Force, always in the daytime. The RAF participated on December 6 1944 with a devastating night attack, which followed an American day attack; a so-called "double strike". A total of 6,300 explosive bombs, 125 mine bombs, 3,000 bomb bombs and 300 phosphor bombs (together nearly 10,000 bombs) were thrown onto Merseburg by the strategic bomber fleets involved. "The city was almost completely destroyed afterwards." 9,800 buildings were destroyed or damaged (only 20% undamaged), there were at least 587 (up to 1,000) dead and 700 injured, 13,500 residents were homeless.

Memorial to the victims of the bombing in the town cemetery. The actual number of victims remains contested, but the city of Merseburg recognises a death toll of 540 although some claim a number closer to 1,000 dead. Most of the bombs were buried in the southern part of the St. Maximi cemetery on a burial ground and in ivy-growing mass graves. In addition to the extensive grave sites, this memorial was built. The inscription reads: "The victims of war and violence". On one of the seven surrounding stone slabs with a total of 400 names reads: "war- and bomb-victims 1940-1945 in Merseburg". A memorial stone on ​​the other side of the grave fields shows the lettering "Die Toten mahnen". The Italian Republic made a memorial with Italian and German inscriptions, "for the solemn remembrance of her dead here," who were killed in the air raids.

Regenstein Castle

Burg
Regenstein is a ruined castle that lies three kilometres north of
Blankenburg. Of this once relatively impregnable castle, which was built
in the early and high Middle Ages on a 294 metre high sandstone rock
towering over the surrounding area, only ruins are visible today.
Several internal rooms, carved into the rock, have survived, as have the
ruins of the keep. The castle is surrounded by remnants of a more
recent fortress. According to legend, once upon a time one of the most
beautiful young women in the land was imprisoned in the dungeon of
Regenstein Castle, because she had spurned the love of the Count of
Regenstein. Using a diamond ring she scratched a hole in the rock, which
became so large after a year that she was able to crawl through and
escape. After her escape, she returned with her family to the castle,
but the count had fled. A little later, she noticed thick smoke gushing
from a crack in a rock wall. When she looked through it, she saw the
count in purgatory. Then, out of pity, she threw him her ring to him in
order to enable the spirit of the count to rest. Schierke i. Harz

Erholungsheim (convalescence home) Barenberg in Wernigerode which, after the war, was included in the new state Saxony-Anhalt.

Burg Saaleck

On
the morning of 24 June 1922, Walther Rathenau, the German foreign
minister, was assassinated as he set off for work from his villa in the
Berlin suburb of Grunewald. From another car one assassin picked
up a long-barrelled machine-pistol and opened fire whilst the other
assassin lobbed a hand grenade into the back of the limousine. The two
killers, Erwin Kern and Hermann Fischer, drove into a side street,
took off their leather gear, disposed of the machine-pistol and calmly
walked away as police cars sped past them on their way to the scene of
the crime. The police mounted the largest manhunt Germany had ever seen:
‘Wanted’ posters appeared all over the country, and police forces were
issued with descriptions of the men. The two assassins made their way
here to
Saaleck Castle whose custodian was a sympathiser, but the
police tracked them down. Kern was killed in a shoot-out and Fischer
committed suicide; both were in their mid-twenties.

Kern
and Fischer were buried in the cemetery below the castle and their
grave became, inevitably, a holy place for the Hitler regime, which had a
large memorial stone placed there. This was still in situ in the
1980s, though the inscription had been removed by the East German
authorities. After German reunification, Saaleck became once more a
gathering point for the far right. The stone was therefore removed
altogether in 2000. But last July it was reported that a large roughly
worked stone had been smuggled into the cemetery by night and placed at
the grave. It bore a crudely incised inscription with the names Fischer
and Kern and the date they died: July 17.Zeitz

The rathaus on Adolf-Hitler-Platz, built in 1509. At the beginning of the Nazi era era, the Gestapo based itself in the Gewandhaus where political opponents from the workers' organisations were subjected to brutality. In 1937/38 a hydrogenation plant for the production of fuels based on brown coal was built in the north-east of Zeitz by the BRABAG Group in preparation for the war planned by the Nazi government. From the summer of 1939 the air-protection preparations in the city were intensified. From 1940, Zeitz became a hospital town, and in 1942 there were 450 wounded in treatment. The city had many "bombed" families from West Germany, Hamburg and Berlin. On the other hand, Zeitzer children were evacuated to rural areas in the framework of the "extended childrens' deportation". On November 30, 1944, an American bomb attack took place on the city of Zeitz itself. During the Nazi dictatorship, Rehmsdorf and Gleina (both at Zeitz) set up the external warehouse system, which was subordinated to Buchenwald concentration camp. From there, almost 10,000 concentration camp prisoners were deployed from the end of May to October 1944 alone in the four hydrogenation systems in order to eliminate the destruction of the Allied bombings and restart production. Most of them were Hungarian Jews, among them Imre Kertész, who had to work in the Brabag factory in Tröglitz. Civilian engineers of the companies, the so-called "Werkbeauftragten", coordinated the work of the prisoners in the place. Production could hardly be carried out, however, given new bomb attacks by the allied bomber groups. The Nobel laureate for literature, Imre Kertész himself, describes his experiences at that time in his autobiographical work "Roman eines Schicksallosen". A bombing target of the Oil Campaign of World War II, the Brabag plant northeast of Zeitz used lignite coal to synthesize ersatz oil – forced labour was provided by the nearby Wille subcamp of Buchenwald in Rehmsdorf and Gleina.The firm Braunkohle-Benzin AG (BRABAG), whose synthetic fuel was supposed to reduce dependence on foreign oil, deployed up to 8,000 prisoners in four plants; in Zeitz alone, 5,000 Jewish prisoners were deployed. During the bomb attacks on the hydrogenation plant, the concentration camp prisoners who were deployed were not allowed to enter the shelters (shelters were only reserved for civilian workers and security guards), which repeatedly demanded numerous victims among the prisoners. The attacks of the bomber units were met by many houses in the town of Zeitz by bombing missiles, when the fog winds of the fog batteries to the camouflage of the Hydrierwerk by the missing wind veiled the city Zeitz and thus also made the target of the bombs. In the town of Zeitz, in the villages of Alt-Tröglitz, Rehmsdorf, Torna, Göbitz and Könderitz, high property damage and many death sacrifices were the result. By the courageous act of six soldiers, including the communists Heinz Groening and Gerhard Engler, the news lines to the anti-aircraft battery destroyed, a frontal tank attack on the city could be prevented. On April 10, 1945, a subsequent attack by US bombers on trains in the freight station, in which Chlorgas was released from hit tank wagons. On the 12th April, US battalions reached the Raum Zeitz. The batteries of the "Flak clock Zeitz" tried in vain to stop them in the loss of earthquake. All bridges over the White Elster were blown up. The city was taken after artillery shooting on 13 and 14 April. The Zeitz barracks were defiantly defended until 15 April.Gardelegen

Under
the direction of an American soldier, German civilians from Gardelegen
are shown on the left carrying wooden crosses to the site where they
were ordered to
bury the bodies of concentration camp prisoners killed by the SS in a
barn just outside the town. It had been widely reported that members of
the local population provided support to the SS during the operation. It
took place on April 13 when more than a thousand prisoners, many of
them sick and too weak to march any further, were taken from the town of
Gardelegen to a large barn on the Isenschnibbe estate and forced inside
the building. The assembled guards then barricaded the doors and set
fire to gasoline-soaked straw. Prisoners who escaped the conflagration
by digging under the barn's walls were killed by the guards. The next
day, the SS and local auxiliaries returned to dispose of the evidence of
their crime. They planned to incinerate what remained of the bodies and
the barn, and kill any survivors of the blaze. The swift advance of the
102nd Infantry Division (United States), however, prevented the SS and
its accomplices from completely carrying out this plan. On April 14,
the 102nd entered Gardelegen and, the following day, discovered the
atrocity. They found the corpses of 1,016 prisoners in the
still-smouldering barn and nearby trenches, where the SS had had the
charred remains dumped. They also interviewed several of the prisoners
who had managed to escape the fire and the shootings. U.S. Army Signal
Corps photographers soon arrived to document the Nazi crime and by April
19, 1945, the story of the Gardelegen massacre began appearing in the
Western press. On that day, both the New York Times and The Washington
Post ran stories on the massacre, quoting one American soldier who
stated:

I
never was so sure before of exactly what I was fighting for. Before
this you would have said those stories were propaganda, but now you know
they weren't. There are the bodies and all those guys are dead.

The Post office on the former Adolf-Hitler-Straße

On
April 21, 1945, the local commander of the 102nd ordered between 200
and 300 men from the town of Gardelegen to give the murdered prisoners a
proper burial. Over the next few days, the German civilians exhumed 586
bodies from the trenches and recovered 430 bodies from the barn,
placing each in an individual grave. On April 25, the 102nd carried out a
ceremony to honour the dead and erected a memorial tablet to the
victims, which stated that the townspeople of Gardelegen are charged
with the responsibility that the “graves are forever kept as green as
the memory of these unfortunates will be kept in the hearts of
freedom-loving men everywhere.” Also on April 25, Colonel George Lynch
addressed German civilians at Gardelegen with the following statement:

The
German people have been told that stories of German atrocities were
Allied propaganda. Here, you can see for yourself. Some will say that
the Nazis were responsible for this crime. Others will point to the
Gestapo. The responsibility rests with neither — it is the
responsibility of the German people....Your so-called Master Race has
demonstrated that it is master only of crime, cruelty and sadism. You
have lost the respect of the civilized world.

Freyburg

The Turnhalle with the grave of 'Turnvater' Jahn and his house, then and now

Between
1825-1852, Freyburg was the home in exile to 18th century gymnastics
educator Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. He was widely regarded as the founder of
modern gymnastics and left behind the world's first gymnasium in
Freyburg. He is buried in Freyburg and his memorial in the town as shown
during the Nazi era and today has become a pilgrimage site for gymnasts
such as Olympic champion Klaus Koeste and world champion Erika
Zuchold.

The
swastika has taken on a number of meanings over time: Thor's hammer, a
sun wheel, a wolf trap, a mill wheel. It has been depicted as crossed
lightning bolts, the four "Fs" of Turnvater [father of gymnastics] Jahn
(frisch = lively, fromm = devout, fröh­ lich = cheerful, frei =
free),and as a fertility sign. In the twentieth century Kerensky's
provisional government in Russia used the swastika on its bank notes as a
symbol of independence.

Hilmar Hoffmann (15) The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism 1933-1945

Köthen

Looking along Hallesche Straße towards St. Jakob's church. On November 16, 1938 Köthen's synagogue was burnt down and demolished the following year during the so-called Kristallnacht. In 1942, the last surviving Jews were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The factory building of the Maschinenfabrik AG v. Wagner & Co. became the engine construction branch of Köthen (MZK) of Junkers Motorenbau GmbH in 1935. After the war, the Junkers aircraft and engine plants were expropriated by order of the Soviet military administration in Germany (SMAD) and the MZK later became VEB Abus (providing equipment for mining and heavy industry). During the air attack on July 20, 1944, the castle and railway station had been targeted.

At the end of 1944 the first refugees from the eastern territories reached the city. On April 14, 1945, American troops from the Pilsen heights approached Köthens to take the city shortly afterwards. In July 1945, the occupation was handed over to the Soviet Army. The numerous refugees who flocked to Köthen were lodged in barracks near the airfield. The Fliegerhorst was subsequently used by the Soviet Air Force and was a military restricted area.

Halle (Saale)

Looking down rathausstraße before the war's destruction and today. During
the war, the Außenlager Birkhahn, a subcamp of Buchenwald, was located
in Halle, where prisoners from Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union,
France, Netherlands and other nations were forced to work in the Siebel
aircraft plants, making combat aircraft. The plant was later
dismantled. In Ammendorf, a large factory owned by Orgacid produced
mustard gas. Near the end of the war there were two bombing raids
carried out against the town: the first on March 31 1945, the second a
few days later. The first attack took place between the railway station
and the centre of the city and the second bombing was in the southern
district. It killed over 1,000 inhabitants; 3,600 buildings were
destroyed and many heavily damaged. Among them, the Market Church, St.
George Church, the Old Town Hall, the City Theatre, historic buildings
on Bruederstrasse and on Grosse Steinstrasse, and the city cemetery. On
April 17 1945, Halle was occupied by American troops, and the red tower
was set on fire by artillery and destroyed. In addition,
the Market Church and the Church of St. George received more hits.
However, the city did not sustain further damage because a planned
aerial bombardment was cancelled,
after the former naval officer Felix von Luckner negotiated the
surrender of the city to the American army. In July, the Americans
withdrew and the city was occupied by the Red Army. Schafstädt

Adolf Hitler Straße and the schloß then and now

Bitterfeld

Hotel Döring sporting Nazi flags; now Hotel Central. Before the war Bitterfeld had been an early modern industrial centre where war substances were also produced. Under the Nazis, several hundred prisoners of war, as well as women and men of different nationalities, had to carry out forced labour in the chemical and armament enterprises of the city until 1945. Under postwar communist control, the region became a symbol of the decay of the economy and dangerous pollution, as the modernisation of the industrial facilities was neglected, thus contributing to the pollution of the environment as far back as it was at the beginning of the 20th century. The accumulation of poisons from the many years of economic woes, especially during the two world wars, had resulted in considerable damage to the environment in this region leading the city to suffer the title of "dirtiest city in Europe." Bitterfeld is one of the most important centres of the popular uprising against the SED dictatorship. On June 17, 1953, up to 50,000 people demonstrated on the central square of the youth and the inland garden meadow - more than Bitterfeld's inhabitants. The teacher Wilhelm Fiebelkorn read a telegram to the government of the GDR demanding the immediate resignation of the government, free elections and the release of political prisoners

Stendal

The Sperlingsbrunnen with Nazi flags behind and today. Hitler spoke here in the Seehalleon October 22, 1932. Stendal increasingly became the focus of Allied bomb attacks in the Second World War, mainly because of the troops of the Wehrmacht stationed there. There were frequent air battles across Stendal, where Allied bombers also crashed over the city or nearby. The Jagdgeschwader stationed there (including the Jagdgeschwader 301 "Wilde Sau") lay directly in the Einflugschneise of the Bomberverbände, which had assigned Berlin as an attack goal. In the spring of 1945, 300 people were killed in a bomb attack on the district of Röxe. The main station was also hit.

The Tangermünder gate flying the Nazi flag and extensively rebuilt. On the 8th of April of the year, bombs struck the St. Nicholas Cathedral, which was partly destroyed: especially the cloister, frescoes, glare and fences. The mediæval glass windows had previously been outsourced and were thus saved. In April 1945 one of the most controversial companies of the final phase of the Second World War, the Sonderkommando Elbe, started from the Stendal-Borstel airfield. On April 13, Mayor Karl Wernecke, was party member in the NSDAP, surrendered the city to the American armed forces. Joseph Goebbels Stendal then referred to him as "dishonourable" because of his supposed cowardly surrender. On May 4, 1945, the German 12th Army (Wenck Army) surrendered under the General Reichsfreiherr von Edelsheim in the Stendal Town Hall. British troops took over the administration in Stendal on 12 June, but were sadly replaced by the Soviet army on 1 July. The Red Army spent the former mayor of Wernecke in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he died in December 1945. As a result of the refugee stream, Stendal was home to about 65,000 inhabitants on 16 June 1945; at the beginning of the war it had only about 34,000 inhabitants.

Other Links

Class Resources

Visits

כללי המבנים Bavarian International School is an international school based in Haimhausen, half an hour outside the city of Munich. nazi locations to visit in bavaria machete and injures two others before hero BMW driver runs him over, in latest attack to shock Germany Syrian refugee, aged 21, went on a machete rampage in the city Reutlingen, Germany near to a doner kebab stand He killed one woman and injured a man and another woman in the attack before being detained by the police A Syrian refugee wielding a machete has killed a pregnant woman and injured a man and another woman in Germany before being arrested by police after he was run over by a man driving a BMW. putting Jake Paul or Pewdiepie in the title Reutlingen near a doner kebab stand in a bus station at Listplatz Square in what has been described as a 'crime of passion'. surviving ww2 ss buildings Police arrest a man who is believed to have gone on a machete rampage killing a woman in the German city of Reutlingen Police arrest a man who is believed to have gone on a machete rampage killing a woman in the German city of Reutlingen The man had his hands bound behind his back Don Black, a former Ku Klux Klan leader who has operated stormfront.org since 1995, said he didn't receive any warning before Network Solutions blocked the use of the stormfront.org name on Friday. Stormfront.org had more than 300,000 registered users, Black said, with traffic increasing since a violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.Reutlingen near a doner kebab stand in a bus station at Listplatz Square. Muslim attacks Terror attacks in Germany /span>